Gettysburg

by Stephen W. Sears

  George Pickett’s division had spent July 2 on the march from Chambersburg, reaching to within some three miles of the battlefield by late afternoon. Pickett sent Walter Harrison of his staff to report to General Lee, while he himself hastened toward the sound of the guns and reported to Longstreet. The two generals watched the fighting for a time, and Longstreet told Pickett that his division should go into bivouac until needed. Major Harrison then joined them, bringing a message from Lee: “Tell General Pickett I shall not want him this evening, to let his men rest, and I will send him word when I want him.”

  This message from the general commanding, delivered to Pickett in Longstreet’s presence, proved to be the sole message Pickett received from his superiors in regard to his next day’s duties. Therefore, being without further orders, General Pickett would rouse his men at the usual hour on July 3 and start them for the battlefield at daylight. According to General Lee’s timetable, which was quite unknown to Pickett, he and the rest of Longstreet’s corps, and Allegheny Johnson’s division, were all supposed to go into action at daylight.

  Here was yet another failure of the Confederates’ high-command system, this one in so simple a thing as delivering orders. It appears that Longstreet, hearing Lee’s message to Pickett (“I will send him word when I want him”)—and remembering Lee earlier giving direct orders to another of Longstreet’s generals, Lafayette McLaws—assumed that Lee would order up Pickett when he wanted him. Lee, having sent Longstreet orders Thursday night for a Friday attack that included Pickett, assumed Longstreet would order his subordinate to the front. Longstreet, of course, ought to have followed up on the matter, but in view of his strained relationship with Lee it is perhaps not surprising that he failed to do so. 21

  However that may be, Pickett’s arrival from Chambersburg finally filled out the First Corps’ order of battle. Yet his three brigades, after making good the corps’ July 2 losses, represented a net gain of only about 1,100 in Longstreet’s troop count. Hood and McLaws each had lost just under one-third of their men in the July 2 battle.

  Hood himself was wounded and out of action, as were two of his brigadiers—Jerome Robertson, hit by a stray shot late in the fighting, and Tige Anderson. Of Hood’s eighteen regimental commanders, nine were dead or wounded. McLaws suffered two of his brigadiers, Paul Semmes and William Barksdale, mortally wounded; six of his twenty regimental commanders were casualties. Of the half-dozen batteries overrun during Longstreet’s offensive, all were recaptured by the Yankees except the three guns of James Smith’s New York 4th Independent, above Devil’s Den. During the night, Texans of Robertson’s brigade crept up to the guns standing abandoned between the lines, wrapped the wheels in blankets, and silently dragged them off.

  With the exception of what General Lee termed “the desired ground” of the Peach Orchard and along the Emmitsburg Road, that part of the battlefield gained by Hood’s and McLaws’s divisions was not of great value tactically. The two areas on the Federal left whose capture might have produced decisive consequences—Little Round Top, and the gap in the Union line on Cemetery Ridge behind the shattered Third Corps—eluded Longstreet primarily because of the absence of reserves to secure them. In this instance, specifically, it was the absence of Pickett’s division. (Pickett, of course, was absent on July 2 because he was performing a guarding function that should have been the responsibility of Jeb Stuart.)

  What Longstreet’s attack did accomplish was to grievously damage the Army of the Potomac. Dan Sickles’s Third Corps was wrecked beyond further use on this field, with a casualty rate of just under 40 percent and stragglers scattered to the Taneytown Road and the Baltimore Pike and beyond. The Fifth Corps, too, was heavily damaged, with the divisions of Barnes and Ayres each losing a quarter of their strength. Before Longstreet was finally subdued, he had attracted, in addition to the Third and Fifth corps, substantial elements of the Second, Sixth, and Twelfth corps, and most of the reserve artillery.

  Dick Anderson’s division, of the Third Corps, had also threatened to break through the Federal line on Cemetery Ridge, but while the assaults of Wilcox, Lang, and Wright were bravely made, they were totally unsupported. Neither Anderson nor A. P. Hill (nor General Lee) thought to correct Anderson’s dispositions so as to mount an assault in depth, as Hood and McLaws had done. And once the attack began, Anderson was neglectful in following it through. Posey’s brigade fired hardly a shot in support; Mahone’s brigade never budged off its starting line. Anderson’s division did not even gain the satisfaction of a lodgment in the Union lines, ending up right back where it began. This was a particularly bitter pill for Rans Wright, for he lost very nearly half his men in this futile enterprise.22

  FOR THE CITIZENS OF GETTYSBURG, it had been a long, nerve-racking day. They had awakened to see companies of Rebel soldiers bivouacking in the streets. At the southern end of town, facing Cemetery Hill, the streets were barricaded to block a Federal counterattack. Yard fences were demolished to permit the free movement of troops street to street. Although the authorities did not confine them to their houses, residents were wary of venturing out among their armed and dangerous occupiers. The lack of news added to their concerns. “It was an anxious time for us,” remembered Gates Fahnestock. “We had no news of how the battle was going.”

  There were a few instances of thievery undertaken in the guise of searching houses for hiding Yankees, but most of what looting took place in Gettysburg was in houses abandoned by their owners. Sarah Broadhead watched such a house across the street from hers be plundered systematically by a party of Confederates who filled a wagon with their booty. But she, like most residents who remained in their homes, was not troubled by looters.

  There was no avoiding requisitions, however. An officer claiming to be on the staff of General Ramseur, of Rodes’s division, demanded food from the Moses McClean family. After emptying the McCleans’s smokehouse of hams, he wrote out a receipt, saying, “Your government ought to pay you for that.” Stores were ransacked and larders, root cellars, kitchen gardens, and barns stripped by hungry Rebels, and receipts were not always given. Every bakery in town was requisitioned to feed the troops and supply the field hospitals. Public buildings and many private houses were filled with wounded, and townspeople volunteered or were commandeered to feed the casualties of both armies. A Confederate soldier, enjoying the fruits of his foraging, was heard to remark, “I think the people of this place are very kind considering we came here to kill off their husbands and sons.”

  Artist Waud’s sketch of Carlisle Street in Gettysburg looks northward past the railroad depot at right, showing a street barricade constructed of dirt, timber, and “old carts.” (Library of Congress)

  At the Globe Inn a large party of Southern officers showed up calling for breakfast. Proprietor Charles Wills served them willingly enough, and when the meal was finished he presented the bill (raising his usual prices by half) and with some trepidation said he would not accept Confederate money. Without blinking an eye the diners paid in Union greenbacks. They were from Jubal Early’s command and most likely their money supply came from the tribute Old Jube had recently levied on York. Mr. Wills kept his dining room open throughout the Confederate occupation and was one of the few in town to turn a profit in these days.

  The southern end of the town was a danger zone, with sharpshooters taking over buildings and exchanging fire with the Yankees. John Rupp’s house was squarely between the picket lines. “The Rebs occupied the whole of town out as far as the back end of my house…,“Mr. Rupp recalled. “Our men occupied my porch, and the Rebels the rear of the house, and I in the cellar, so you can see I was on neutral ground.” This sharpshooter fire made it hazardous for anyone to venture outside. Businessman Jacob Hollinger spent the day in the cellar with his family, but he needed to visit the barn to feed the chickens and milk the cow. Federal riflemen nearly hit him between house and barn. When he remarked on this to a Confederate officer, he was told, “Why man, take off that gray suit. Th
ey think you are a Reb!”

  The artillery duel in late afternoon, and the evening’s fighting on Culp’s and Cemetery hills, further raised fears among the townspeople. While the town was not in the direct line of fire, stray shells did hit here and there, and rifle fire peppered many buildings. There were no reported civilian casualties, but a number of near misses. According to Fannie Buehler, “…it was the most awful time of the awful battle … the ground trembled on which our house stood.“23

  Doctors at the field hospitals on both sides of the lines labored straight through the night by lantern light. Surgeon John Shaw Billings, Ayres’s Fifth Corps division, set up in a stone house behind Little Round Top and “the wounded began to pour in. I performed a large number of operations of various kinds, received and fed 750 wounded, and worked all that night without cessation.” The Fifth Corps’ eighty-one ambulances had evacuated 1,300 casualties by 4:00 A.M. on July 3, reported the corps ambulance chief proudly. The last six wounded in his sector were beyond the picket line, “in which case we were unable to get them.”

  These hospitals, whether Union or Confederate, whether in tents or barns or houses or in the open, were aptly described by a Southerner as “miserable death Holes.” The first sight to greet anyone approaching them was the growing piles of amputated hands and feet and whole limbs. A Pennsylvanian who witnessed this sight at a corps hospital in a stone barn likened it to a Philadelphia slaughterhouse. The bedlam of cries and screams emanating from these places became so loud that night that bands were paraded into the space between the field hospitals and the front lines and ordered to play with spirit, and loudly.24

  Troops on the battle lines were not allowed fires, so they munched on whatever rations they had or could scrounge from any source, including the haversacks of the dead. At Spangler’s Spring between the lines at Culp’s Hill, men of both armies surreptitiously filled their canteens and (as one Yankee wrote) “backed out with the best grace he could command….” Whether fed and watered or not, the two armies fell into exhausted sleep. Porter Alexander described his routine: “What with deep dust & blood, & filth of all kinds, the trampled & wrecked Peach Orchard was a very unattractive place, but I secured two good straight fence rails, …placed about four inches apart under one of the trees, & with my saddle for a pillow & with the dead men & horses of the enemy all around, I got two hours of good sound & needed sleep.” 25

  IN THE EARLY HOURS of July 3, after the war council had adjourned, a packet of high-profile intelligence arrived at General Meade’s headquarters. Captain Ulric Dahlgren and a party of cavalry had intercepted a Confederate mail courier in Greencastle, some 30 miles to the southwest, and discovered dispatches addressed to General Lee from President Jefferson Davis and Adjutant General Samuel Cooper. The president and Cooper, in replying to Lee’s queries, explained that no reinforcements would be forthcoming, and rejected Lee’s proposal for at least a shadow army under Beauregard to assemble in northern Virginia to menace Washington while Lee menaced Pennsylvania. The captured letters served as a nice confirmation of the Bureau of Military Information’s order of battle for Lee’s army, and Meade no doubt took comfort knowing the enemy he was facing would get no stronger than it already was.26

  During the night and into the morning Meade and his lieutenants hurriedly picked up the pieces from the July 2 fighting and arranged their troops as best they could calculate for what was to come. On the left, the Fifth Corps remained more or less where it was at the end of the fighting, digging in on Round Top and Little Round Top and extending north to the Millerstown Road. James Barnes’s division had taken a beating, and late in the fighting Barnes himself was wounded by a shell fragment. Of Barnes’s three brigades, Sweitzer’s was the hardest hit. When the 9th Massachusetts rejoined Sweitzer after picket duty, wrote Colonel Patrick Guiney, “We could scarcely be said to join the Brigade; it seemed to me that it would be more appropriate to say that we constituted the Brigade. There were the flags of the regiments, & a remnant of a splendid regiment around each, & there were a few officers near their respective colors….” Bracing the sagging Fifth Corps were two brigades from Sedgwick’s Sixth Corps.

  As part of Meade’s process of rectifying his battle lines, two other brigades from the Sixth Corps were posted behind Round Top, facing south astraddle the Taneytown Road, to guard against a Confederate flanking movement. To the north of the Millerstown Road was a variegated command mostly patched together under John Newton of the First Corps. During the evening’s crisis on Cemetery Ridge, Newton had come to Hancock’s aid with Doubleday’s First Corps division, and it was wedged into the center of the line. Into the gap between Doubleday and the Fifth Corps was inserted Caldwell’s battered Second Corps division, two fresh brigades from the Sixth Corps, and in reserve, what was left of the Third Corps.

  Extending northward along Cemetery Ridge from Doubleday’s position were the Second Corps divisions of John Gibbon—alerted by Meade to expect the brunt of a Confederate attack—and Alexander Hays. These carried the line to Cemetery and Culp’s hills, where the remains of the First Corps supported Howard’s Eleventh Corps and Slocum’s Twelfth. The Twelfth’s primary responsibility remained Culp’s Hill.

  The Sixth Corps, largest in the army, was parceled out in all directions—two brigades on the far left behind Round Top, two in support of the Fifth Corps, two in Newton’s line, and the final two in support of the Twelfth Corps on the army’s right. Being the last corps to arrive on the field, with all the others already in their places, this was perhaps inevitable, but it did not make Uncle John Sedgwick very happy. Richard Halsted of Sedgwick’s staff wrote that “the General had not a man or a gun under his command, except a few orderlies…. The General himself said he thought he might as well go home.”

  Meanwhile Henry Hunt was tireless in organizing and reorganizing and refitting the artillery arm that night and morning. Broken batteries were consolidated, ammunition replenished, repairs made, teams replaced. Like its infantry, the Sixth Corps’ artillery was parceled out to wherever the need appeared greatest. Hunt retained fourteen batteries as a tactical reserve behind the center of the line, along with the army’s ammunition trains. His ace in the hole, however, was an extra, non-regulation, sixty-wagon supply of ammunition—twenty rounds per gun—that he had finagled in “a sub-rosa affair” with Rufus Ingalls, the Potomac army’s chief quartermaster. By Hunt’s account, “it stood us in hand at the pinch.”

  The decision in May to restore General Hunt to full and unfettered tactical command of the Army of the Potomac’s artillery, taken grudgingly by Joe Hooker after the Chancellorsville debacle, paid off in full on this 3rd of July. Hunt testified to his role at Gettysburg: “ordered artillery from wherever I could find it, where I thought it could be spared, without any regard to the commands of others, except to inform them that it was necessary….” Henry Hunt was certain that his guns would have to be at the core of the defense that day, and he vowed they would be ready.27

  The often opportunistic, crisis-of-the-moment placement of troops had left the army’s corps-command system in something of a tangle. On the left, Fifth and Sixth corps troops were intermixed. In the center, one of the Second Corps divisions was separated from the other two by a First Corps division, remnants of the Third Corps, and some Sixth Corps men. On Cemetery Hill was one First Corps division and the Eleventh Corps; on Culp’s Hill, one First Corps division and the Twelfth Corps. For the defense of Culp’s Hill the Twelfth was more or less autonomous, yet its nominal commander, Henry Slocum, continued to consider himself in command of the army’s right wing. With the emergency over, David Birney reclaimed the remains of the Third Corps, and Winfield Hancock returned to his Second Corps command. It was not entirely clear, however, who commanded what in the tangle of units just north of the Fifth Corps.

  With the army assuming a purely defensive stance on July 3, these tangled chains of command were not unduly alarming; generally, fighting defensively did not require the command timing
and coordination of the offensive. When General Newton discovered a gap in the line that morning, for example, he got it filled by appealing separately to Meade and to Hancock, and July 2 had clearly demonstrated the willingness of one general to help another who was hard-pressed.

  Yet on July 3 everything in the Army of the Potomac without exception was set up for defense; there was not a single preparation for taking the offense, either in forces or in command. Hancock would later testify that Meade told him—presumably this was on the morning of July 3—“that if the enemy attacked me he intended to put the 5th and 6th corps on the enemy’s flank.” Meade, however, took no steps in that direction. The army’s last reserve, the Sixth Corps, was now scattered literally from one end of the battleground to the other. The closest thing to a unified command—to launch a counterattack, say—were the two adjacent divisions of the Second Corps, under Hancock’s lead. However, the two were squarely at the center of the line—just where Meade had predicted the Confederates’ attack would fall.

  General Meade seemed content with this untidy arrangement. On the right, in an emergency, he could still call on his trusted senior lieutenant, Henry Slocum. Having assumed the cloak of wing commander, Slocum would thereby act. At the center was the equally trusted Hancock, although Hancock’s sphere of command was not exactly clear; still, during the heat of battle, officers tended to listen to and obey Winfield Hancock. Sykes led by default on the left. It is surprising that Meade made no use of his other trusted lieutenant, John Sedgwick, for the left. Uncle John may have been short on military imagination, but he was solid and dependable, especially on defense, and he was Sykes’s senior. Perhaps Meade reasoned that Sykes knew the field and Sedgwick did not. However that may be, Meade had demonstrated on Thursday how active a commanding general he was, and no doubt he intended to replay that role on Friday. 28